Exceptional teachers: Lessons from my life

I studied in Ramakrishna Mission School (Narendrapur), Presidency College (Kolkata) and Delhi School of Economics. The last two will ring a bell anywhere in the country. The first one probably won’t, not unless you are from West Bengal or are familiar with the place. Today is the day when I could have opted to write on some aspect of the state of education in India. But it is Teacher’s Day, Guru Utsava, if you prefer. All three are among the better educational institutions in the country. Every educational institution goes through cycles, it has ups and downs. Teachers come and go. My definition of a good educational institution is one where the quality of teaching never drops below a minimum threshold. Since these three were/are good, I have had good teachers. That doesn’t necessarily mean I have had exceptional teachers. If I singled out and mentioned the exceptional teachers I have had in Presidency College or Delhi School, the names will ring a bell, at least in some quarters. Instead, I have opted for my school, where I was between the formative years of 10 and 15. I will mention three teachers and their names won’t ring bells. After the three anecdotes, I hope to make a broader point.

But I need to tell you about Ramakrishna Mission Vidyalaya, Narendrapur, first. It was set up in 1958 and we were among the earlier batches of students. In those days, it certainly wasn’t as famous as it is today. It was a residential school. What’s important is that there was/is a college in the same campus. The headmaster was Barun-da, now Swami Prabhananda, one of the three Vice Presidents of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. For those who don’t know the system, a Swami is one who is clad in saffron/ochre. Before that, there is a brahmachari stage, where the person who has decided to become a monk is clad in white. There is a graduation process from the white to the saffron/ochre, which is irrelevant for present purposes. The year was 1968 and Har Gobind Khorana was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Barun-da decided the school students needed to know a bit about Khorana’s work. There was a gentleman named Prasanta Giri. I have no idea what his designation or specialization was. He wasn’t someone who taught in the school. Logic suggests he must have been a Lecturer in Chemistry (or Biology) in the college. Prasanta Giri delivered a 2-hour lecture to 13-year-olds on evolution and genetics and had us (at least me) spellbound. Without ever having studied it, if I still retain some interest in the subject, that’s entirely because of that single talk.

The second person is a gentleman named Christopher James Stock. In those days, in the West Bengal Higher Secondary Education scheme of things, the terminal examination was at the end of Standard XI, there being no difference between Secondary and Higher Secondary. Generations of school students (at least those who chose English as a First Language), must have had “Pride and Prejudice” inflicted on them, together with “Silas Marner” and “Julius Caesar”. Mr Stock was not quite part of the system. He was an Englishman. The school must have had some arrangement with such visiting Englishmen, who spent some time there, teaching students English. The school library was Spartan, possessing the bare text-books. But the college library wasn’t and we had access. Perhaps because he was from outside the system, Mr Stock persuaded me there was much more to Jane Austen, George Eliot and Shakespeare than these three texts, which had been rendered boring. He soon had me wade through everything you could think of, from Thomas Hardy to Charles Dickens, even Mikhail Sholokhov. If I have an interest in English literature, or literature in general, that’s due in no small measure to Mr Stock. Later, he retired and settled down in London. Or so I heard. I lost touch. On a much later visit to London, I discovered there were 17 entries in the London telephone directory in the name of Christopher James Stock. I rung all of them up, hoping to find the one to whom I owed a debt. Alas, none of these was the right one.

I don’t know, and never knew, the third person’s name at all. He was a brahmachari and probably taught in the college. We were lodged in various hostels and he once paid our hostel a visit in the evening. The year was 1965 and some of us were agog at the prospect of seeing the comet Ikeya-Seki. When he paid us a visit, he asked us if we knew the names of some of the stars in the night-sky. He probably expected us to identify Sirius. But clearly, he hadn’t expected me to identify Canopus, Dubhe and Merak. The long and the short of it was that he took me in hand. There was a marvelous telescope in the college. Naturally, school students weren’t allowed access. However, thanks to him, I got my first glimpse of Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings, a sight I have still not forgotten. He also got me working on making a reflecting telescope. I was busy grinding a mirror all the time. Alas, the mirror has to be ground exactly right. I never accomplished what I hoped I would, a match for the college telescope.

Notice that all three instances aren’t about regular teaching, regular syllabi and regular texts. All three gentlemen ignited a so-called extra-curricular interest in an impressionable mind. That is what an exceptional teacher does. He/she doesn’t teach. He/she makes the student learn. The two objectives aren’t synonymous. I think the pertinent question is the following. Does the system, in all its various dimensions, encourage such exceptional individuals, or shackle them?

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Bibek Debroy is an economist, columnist and author. He has worked for the government, for an industry chamber and for academic (teaching and research) institutes. He is the author of several books, papers and popular articles. He is now a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi

Bibek Debroy is an economist, columnist and author. He has worked for the government, for an industry chamber and for academic (teaching and research) insti. . .